Maybe we recognize it in the moment, or perhaps it becomes visible only when refracted through time: the instant we look toward the future, everything we cherish in the present begins to recede into the past.

Science fiction, at its best, has long examined this tension. How can a future be rendered with such verisimilitude that we recognize ourselves within it today? Sometimes the answer lies in grounding the story in human experience; at other times, it depends on the medium itself. During the 1980s this became especially clear. Advances in visual effects, sound, and cinematography allowed filmmakers to construct futures with greater precision and plausibility. Extraterrestrials shed their rubber suits. Robots ceased to blink like toys. The imagined future stopped serving as a stage for mythic struggle and became a surface on which to project the anxieties of the day.

Although released in 1979, Alien marked the beginning of this new canon, one in which we glimpse the coming singularity, where human and machine eventually converge. Consider the ship’s science officer, Ash, portrayed by the understated and magnificent Ian Holm. His manner is calm, his authority certain. For most of the film he passes as human; the discovery that he is not lands as a philosophical rupture. Ash is not monstrous. He is persuasive. Through him, we shed the naive glow and enter a more shadowed realm, one altered not by distance but by the technologies we invited in.

This was the decade I entered my teens, a time when adulthood, and the appearance of independence it conferred, still felt impossibly distant. We lived on a farm in a weathered, wood-shingled house built in the nineteenth century, miles from anything resembling modernity. Daily life followed the routines of schooling, the completion of chores, and the tending of livestock and crops. At night, the only visible light arrived from distant stars and the faint pulsing of transmission towers on the horizon, a flicker suggesting that some larger world might still exist beyond the fields. Still, I remained transfixed. I read what little I could find about space, technology, and the future. I scavenged for anything that carried a circuit or a signal, built lightsabers from salvaged parts, and stared into the sky with something close to reverence. Perhaps it was a way to forget what surrounded me, or to believe that something else awaited beyond it.

Then I discovered a lifeline in the form of a magazine called Omni. The word itself felt charged, suggesting breadth, totality, a reaching beyond the known, like a communiqué from a more advanced future.

The magazine was unlike anything I had encountered. Glossy, weighty in the hand, and unapologetically bold, its covers featured alluring aliens, chrome skylines, or spacefaring deities rendered in vapor-lit realism against a black background. Its nearest peers were Playboy and Penthouse; the latter shared the same publisher, who installed his wife, a South African ballerina turned stripper, as its president.

In place of centerfolds, the magazine offered alternate futures. Articles appeared under elemental headings: Earth; Life; Stars; The Arts; and UFO Update. The pages moved among hard science, speculative fiction, and artistic experimentation: a cartoon of a robot shaving on one, a short piece on the real bionic man or electron-microscope images resembling alien landscapes on the next. There were no celebrities in the usual sense. Instead, its contributors were defining voices in science and rising figures in speculative fiction: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Orson Scott Card, George R. R. Martin. It was, in effect, a magazine for the imaginative.

This was before information became endless, fragmented, and instantly disposable. There was no clicking ahead, no scrolling through. You read it from cover to cover. And for the princely sum of twelve dollars a year, a new issue would arrive in our mailbox each month.

Omni’s tenure spanned nearly two decades, sustained by loyal subscribers and an odd assortment of advertisers: Macmillan’s Ring-Free Motor Oil, Ginseng Cologne, and Wild Turkey Bourbon among them. But as in many long-told stories, the death of a beautiful woman marked its end. What had once seemed an unlikely appointment of the ballerina turned stripper turned publisher became the source of the magazine’s creative life. Her judgment and presence gave it cohesion and nerve. When she died unexpectedly, the publication lost its way. And while the magazine still exists as a cultural artifact, most of what I read in its pages has faded from recollection, like the ephemera of dreams upon waking. 

Still, there is one story I return to, a remnant of something once real, though finding the original continues to elude me. The title was something like “Decaying Memory.” Every so often, I search for it again. Sometimes a cache of old issues appears on eBay, the result of a hoarder clearing an attic or a relative settling an estate. Hoping the story might be among them, I place the order and wait. Days or weeks later, a brown envelope from Oregon or Ohio arrives, carrying another batch. I scan the indexes quickly, then turn page by page. Waves of memory return, vivid and unexpected. The story itself never appears.

As the technologies once imagined in the magazine finally came to life, I searched again, this time through engines, archives, and artificial intelligence. By then the catalog had been digitized. I entered every phrase I could recall. The algorithm strained to reconstruct the original, returning what it could: titles, fragments, near matches. None was the story I remembered.

The plot, drawn from what remains of recollection, is this: A man whose name is something like Édouard, wishing to give the woman he loves a rare gift, employs a company that promises to preserve experience itself. For a fee that feels extravagant for the time, the firm dispatches a small drone, roughly the size and shape of a mosquito, to record a portion of their life together. At first its presence is obvious, then, as the benevolent voyeur settles into the room, they begin to relax into being observed. What it captures seems otherwise unremarkable: a handful of ordinary moments, morning coffee, preparation for the day, words passed across a room, the unspoken choreography of two people bound by habit and regard.

Then, as in life, the woman dies.

Grief-stricken, Édouard returns to the company. Not to preserve the past, but to simulate her presence. This is before distributed storage and before personal devices carried whole archives. The only way to access the recordings is within the company’s office. There, in a small viewing booth enclosed by pale walls and lit by a cool, indifferent glow, he is left alone with the past. He can replay the footage as often as he wishes. And he does.

At first the images are crisp, the woman’s voice familiar, her gestures exact. She stands in the kitchen, arm outstretched toward the camera. “We received a postcard in the mail from Emma,” she says, her smile lifting at the corners of her mouth, her eyes creasing in a way he knows by heart. In another scene she pauses at the window, then turns toward him. “Do you want to go to the lake this weekend?” Her tone is casual, yet inviting, and he hears his own reply, “I would love to, but there is this work assignment…,” though it already feels borrowed, belonging to someone else.

In another fragment she stands by the counter, pouring coffee. “Did you feed the cat?” she asks. He nods from off-screen. “That is why she still prefers you,” she says, half teasing, half true.

Then the footage begins to change. At first it is only a speck at the edge of the frame, like dust to be brushed from a print. A shimmer follows, the kind that threads through a strip of film left too long in the Sun. Soon her words catch by a half beat. “Do you want to go to the lake... this weekend?” The smile falters, lingers, then slips. Her eyes blur. The crinkle at the corners vanishes. Movements stutter; the faint hum behind the frame seems to stretch thin. Colors fade into the pallor of driftwood, the rest dissolving slow and certain, like the shoreline meeting the sea.

Still, he returns. Each visit erases more. Her voice thins to a whisper, then to a rasp of static. A hand freezes midair. A face loses its contour. The footage flickers; her outline wavers against the pale wall. By the final visit, all that remains is a flare of light across the screen, followed by silence.

Then nothing.

The horror is not in forgetting but in the labor of remembrance. He is not preserving the past; he is consuming it. In trying to remain near her, he helps erase her.

On first reading, the story did not strike me as narrative; it felt like a premonition. Only months past a first kiss and still years from anything resembling a relationship, I could not have explained why. Yet some part of me already knew. Perhaps it was the way young songwriters seem to sense longing, not because they have lived it fully, but because the feeling they sing is so unmistakably true.

Listen to Neil Young’s song “Old Man” from the album Harvest, written in his early twenties, and hear a line like, “Love lost, such a cost. Give me things that do not get lost, like a coin that will not get tossed, rolling home to you.” It settles somewhere inside you, as if recalling a moment yet to be lived. A scene so ordinary it becomes unbearable in its absence that you try to hold it. Then the person leaves. Or lets go. Or worse, you let go, only to see what you had lost. The pain is not only their absence. It is the loss of the shared continuity that once passed between you, the knowledge that you both remembered it the same way, and now no one else does.

Do those feelings ever truly disappear?

Years passed. Love came, and with it, loss. Not only of those I cared for, but of dreams that once steered my days, and of the innocent certainties that made the world seem simple. The future that once appeared limitless turned closer, more human. Science fiction, once a lens for imagining what might come, revealed the true nature of time: not only a vessel that carries us forward, but an agent of loss itself. I no longer wished to skip ahead. My attention turned from the distant to the near, to the present where life occurs. I abandoned the idealized in favor of what is real. The question was no longer what the future might hold, but how to hold fast to what is here, so it does not slip away.

Yet even then, something remained. A sense, faint but familiar, that the future still held its own warnings. I could feel it, as once I had felt the story’s premonition: a presence waiting just beyond the horizon. When it arrived, it did so suddenly, like the light filling a room the moment a switch is turned. 

That instant arrived while I was visiting Northern California. It was during a meditation retreat led by a Zen teacher in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The setting was spare: a few wooden buildings among pine trees and dry grass. No clocks. No phones. No writing. 

Time passed, measured in breaths. Each day followed a simple order. 

We sat in rows facing the front of the hall, where an elevated platform held the teacher’s seat. He began with a short talk that served as a prelude to long periods of seated meditation. At the close of each session, a bell sounded softly, signaling a chance to unfold, stretch, or rest before returning to stillness. Meals were taken in silence. In the evenings, after the final sitting, the teacher invited participants to ask a few questions.

One night, a woman near the front raised her hand. The teacher nodded. “My life is very good right now,” she began, and she named the things that filled it. “I have no reason to worry. And yet I do. Not about anything in particular. Only a sense that while everything is good now, something will go wrong. I just do not know when or what.”

 “So why do I still worry?” she asked. With those words my attention sharpened. There was a long pause.

The teacher looked at her and said, “Ultimately, you lose everything.” “You lose everything that matters to you.”

She began, “But…” and stopped.

“You will lose everything,” he repeated.

His voice held no judgment, no trace of comfort or warning. It was less revelation than confirmation, a truth that seemed to draw the air from the room, thinned by the plainness of his words. As he spoke, the the space itself seemed to fall away, along with the edges of my body and the rows around me. In its place came a widening silence, leaving nothing more to be said.

Looking back at that adolescent boy on the farm, I recall how eagerly he welcomed the future. In many respects, it arrived. Cars now steer themselves. Networks bind people across distance. Machines and their unseen software extend the reach of collective memory. The humanoid figures once confined to science fiction now stand nearer than we could ever have imagined.

Something else appeared as well. The human came into view. The ordinary gathered substance. The once unnoticed days, the belongings that slipped away, the friends who faded from sight. Each small departure marked less the passage of time than the loss of a certain innocence, followed by the recognition that, like that coin in the old song, some things will never return.

If all is to be lost in time, it will not be the grand occasions I miss. Not the speeches or staged events. Not the moments kept in photographs or recordings. Those may exist beyond me, and that will be enough. What I hope to hold longest are the smaller hours — the ones no one else noticed, the ones that seemed unimportant then yet came to define the texture of a life: driving alone on an empty road at dusk; the lightness in limbs after a long run; pulling a warm T-shirt from the dryer.

Above all, I hope to remember what was shared: the glance from across a room; the language we made our own; the conversations that stretched over days; the song we once tried to sing together; the laughter that lingered after the sound itself had passed; or the last time we hugged and neither of us pulled away.

These were never milestones. They were never planned. Yet they made everything else worth living for. If everything must be lost, let these be the last to go, the moments that, refracted through time, return with the light of what was once real, flickering back to life before fading once more.¶

Audio version on Soundcloud.

The Omni Archive..